Trillion FPS Camera Captures Advancing Light Waves

How fast can your camera shoot photos? 60 frames per second? Pah. 1,000 fps? Puh-lease. What’s that? You have a Phantom camera that’ll shoot one million fps? Whatever. MIT’s new camera will shoot one trillion frames per second.

Let’s put that in some perspective. One trillion seconds is over 31,688 years. So if you shot one second of footage on this camera, and played it back at 30fps, it’d still take you over 1,000 years to watch it. That’s one boring-ass home movie.

Of course, the “camera” can’t be taken on vacation, and even if it could, there wouldn’t be enough light on even the sunniest beach to support shooting so fast. What MIT’s device (designed by Professor Ramesh Raskar and team) does is to use “femtosecond laser illumination, picosecond-accurate detectors and mathematical reconstruction techniques” to illuminate a scene and then capture the pulses of laser light. And like all good magic, the kit also uses mirrors: in this case to move the view of the camera.

Nor does the camera run for a full second. The movies are 480 frames long, and show a slice in time of just 1.71 picoseconds.

The result is a movie of an advancing wave of light. The individual frames can also be colorized to show a rainbow of wavefronts:

If your jaw isn’t on the ground right now, then shame on you. If you want to see more, you should head the team’s project page at MIT where you can see such wonders as a single pulse of light traveling the length of a soda bottle in one billionth of a second, and wavefronts rippling over still-life setups as if they were waves of water lapping at a beach.